If the arms of Brown and the legs of Robinson waved from the same composite body, they would seem to be waving something of a sad farewell. But if our friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, when out for a Sunday walk, were transformed and amalgamated into an Asiatic idol before our eyes, they would surely seem farther away. If an Asiatic god has three heads and seven arms, there is at least in it an idea of material incarnation bringing an unknown power nearer to us and not farther away.
And these multitudinous idolatries of man kind have something about them in many ways more human and sympathetic than modern metaphysical abstractions. Man is not indeed the idol but man is almost everywhere the idolator. And it has a much better light to be called, in a reasonable sense, the religion of humanity. Even in the days of my youth, I remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal contradiction and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.īut there is another entity, more or less definable and much more imaginable than the many-headed and monstrous idol of mankind. In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Only both of them are very like many identifications by 'the best authorities' on comparative religion and when Catholic creeds are identified with various wild myths, I do not laugh or curse or misbehave myself I confine myself decorously to saying that the identification is not complete.
But that is not better than the real appearance of Minerva as the Bearded Woman of Mr. Belloc made his burlesque don say that a bust of Ariadne had been proved by modern research to be a Silenus. The modern world is madder than any satires on it long ago Mr.
That is what we call a powerful understatement. The best authorities identify Sul with Minerva, but this has been held to show that the identification is not complete.' 'Yes, ' he said with a certain delicate exactitude, 'that is supposed to represent the local god Sul. I pointed out a sculpture of the head of the sun with the usual halo of rays, but with the difference that the face in the disc, instead of being boyish like Apollo, was bearded like Neptune or Jupiter. Possibly the professor saw the joke, though he maintained an iron gravity, and may or may not have realised that it was a joke against a great deal of what is called comparative religion. I was once escorted over the Roman foundations of an ancient British city by a professor, who said something that seems to me a satire on a good many other professors.
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